The Colorado Times Recorder reported this month that the 3 NC sites are among 170 nationwide where detainees are kept, often indefinitely, without oversight.
ICE is keeping tens of thousands of detainees in 170 secret “hold rooms” across the country, the Colorado Times Recorder reported this month, including at least three sites in North Carolina.
The “hold rooms” are undisclosed, the Times Recorder found, and though there are rules for how long detainees can be kept there, ICE officials often flout them, creating a network of sites where they can keep people indefinitely with little scrutiny or oversight.
There are few requirements for the conditions of the facilities.
“Located in warehouses, strip malls, office parks, and ICE substations, the facilities are held to different standards than the agency’s official detention facilities,” the Times Recorder reported. “They are not permitted to contain beds, and are not required to contain toilets.”
The North Carolina sites are:
- A DHS facility at 140 Centrewest Court, in Cary.
- A DHS facility at 6130 Tyvola Centre Drive in Charlotte.
- And a long building surrounded by a barbed-wire fence with no signs and few windows, at 518 6th Avenue West in Hendersonville.
Analyzing data it received through a Freedom of Information Act, the Times Recorder reported that the number of detainees and facilities showed “a dramatic expansion of their use” during President Donald Trump’s second term in office.
“Until last June, the time limit for hold room detentions was 12 hours; the Trump administration upped the limit to 72 hours soon after Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Advisor Stephen Miller and then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem ordered ICE to triple its arrest quota to 3,000 per day,” the Times Recorder wrote.
“Now, in violation of the agency’s own rules, hold rooms increasingly serve as unofficial, undisclosed long-term detention facilities.”
ICE raids in Raleigh and Charlotte last year resulted in the arrest of more than 3,400 people, most of whom did not have violent criminal records.
Department of Homeland Security officials said the NC raids were targeted at dangerous criminals, but instead they arrested landscapers, church volunteers, and students, dragging people from their cars and homes.
JD Mazuera Arias, a Charlotte City Councilman, told CNN in November that the raids were the opposite of public safety.
“I do not see this as an improvement of public safety. If anything it’s doing the opposite. It’s causing chaos, it’s causing fear, it’s causing confusion,” Arias said.
If the arrest demographics from last year are any measure, the people being held in the NC “hold rooms” are far from the worst of the worst. And the secretive nature of the rooms makes it difficult to discern, the Times Reporter said.
“These offices, where immigrants are often asked to report for appointments with immigration authorities, are not disclosed in ICE records or elsewhere as long-term detention facilities, despite data showing many of them holding detainees for weeks at a time,” the news site reported.
The Times Recorder was “one of the first outlets in the nation to report anything about the secretive detention facilities,” the paper wrote, prompting “outreach from concerned citizens in other states, asking what we knew about the facilities in their necks of the woods.”
